Sure, but having the bitcoin sitting in the bitcoin wallet doing nothing makes it kinda worthless, yah? The whole idea is to use it for commerce, at which point you are vulnerable to all sorts of scams and theft that you would normally be protected from.
The design is similar to cash. When you give $20 to the fast food joint down the road and decide you didn't like the food, your only recourse it to ask them for the money back. You can't phone up your credit card company and ask them to cancel the charges.
Sure, that is a model with pros and cons, but nothing prevents people from doing legitimate commerce in bitcoin.
Then there's liquidity. Most transactions are off-block-chain (as in one block-chain transaction per every ~400 or so off-block-chain transactions). They have to be, because putting a transaction on the block-chain takes too long.
That is definitely a limitation of bitcoin. It cannot be used safely and quickly at the same time. If you're not in a hurry there is no need to compromise safety though. I personally wouldn't use it for anything where a transaction needed to be done in seconds.
And then of course there's the volatility of the buying power of bitcoin itself. It's one of the most unstable and volatile currencies in existence.
That is just the nature of low-volume financial instruments of almost any kind. Look at penny stocks and such - they're extremely volatile. If it were used in real commerce it would stabilize pretty quickly, since if the price went up significantly somebody would just sell 30 tons of steel for bitcoins and make a huge profit, and when the price drops significantly they'd buy back the 30 tons of steel. What keeps currency stable is the HUGE market full of stuff whose vendors don't adjust prices 3 times per minute.
The reality is that the value of the dollar goes up and down by pennies all day long and yet the price of a carton of eggs at Walmart stays the same all day long. That means that at different times of day the profit of selling those eggs actually changes. If everybody did with dollars what they do with bitcoins and dynamically priced based on the currency value then you'd see much larger swings in the value of the dollar, because it wouldn't have the weight of the entire economy pinning its value. Governments would also not be able to play the same games they do with inflation. The whole "Grexit" thing is about Greece not wanting to cut pensions and such, but one possible solution they talk about is switching to Drachmas, which basically amounts to just cutting pensions by paying the same number of currency units but devaluing the currency in the process.
No, this is exactly the reason why open source is having such a problem. 'You can always audit the source code'. Yeah okay buddy, because I have the time/money to spend on extra programmers just to audit the problem you created.
You do realize that you can purchase open source software commercially, right? Then you get the same level of support that you get with proprietary software, and you get the source code as well.
How many bitcoin banks have decided to cut and run at this point?
Bitcoin is cash. What you call a "bitcoin bank" is really just a "bitcoin wallet" in somebody else's possession, and it is about as safe as trusting somebody with a wallet full of cash.
The closest thing to a bitcoin wallet involving a bank is putting cash in a safe deposit box. If you do that in the US it isn't protected by the FDIC. If you want to be protected by banking regulations you have to deposit your money.
Bitcoin was never designed around letting others hold your money. The design was really for individuals to hold their own money.
That's pretty much the same sentiment they had just before the Vietnam war. And then took a big bloody nose from the inferior Migs.
Very true, but just because missiles weren't ready to take over in Vietnam doesn't mean that they aren't ready today.
Vietnam also suffered from a lot of other problems. For one ROE - aircraft had to make visual identification before engaging, which basically negated any advantage the US aircraft even had. That and the general limited warfare thing which turned the whole theater into a meat grinder. Nobody was seriously bombing the bases the enemy aircraft were based at.
Vietnam was a LONG time ago now, much longer ago today than WW2 was back during Vietnam. People were quoting Vietnam this and that in the first Gulf War, and it wasn't remotely like Vietnam.
That said, unless the air force has some tricks up its sleeves that nobody knows about, the long-range missile capabilities of the US aren't really all that much better than anybody else's, which seems a bit crazy when they are relying on blowing up the bad buys before it comes down to a dogfight.
After the debacle with the F-22 and the F-105 I can't believe they bought another single engine fighter.
Well, the whole idea of the F-35 was that it was supposed to be the cheap replacement for the F-16, and hence the single engine. The problem was that they just tried to do too much with it, because heaven forbid that it isn't the absolute best in every category. By the time they really get it operational everybody will be using drones for this sort of thing anyway. Think about it - the mission of the F-35 is to be the bulk of the force, but not the aircraft you send in on the most critical air superiority missions (that is the role of the F-22). I'd think that would be the sort of thing you could easily use a drone for - take off, drop bombs, come back, and if AWACS spots enemy fighters either engage if you greatly overpower them, or just run and let the F-22s deal with them. Just have lots of ground crew taking care of the drones and you could basically have those things up in the air most of the time.
I also don't think that dogfighting is the real threat here. I already mentioned long-range AA missiles, but SAMs are a big threat too. Russia has those SA-10s which as far as I understand are VERY capable. I have no idea how well stealth defeats them, but they're really bad news for aircraft in general. Maybe they're counting on cruise missiles taking them out.
I'm not familiar with zfs either, but I suppose this would be a basic function of zfs interfaces, wouldn't it?
Only if it is implemented as such. It probably isn't.
Suppose you have a file which was modified once (ie there are two versions). The overall filesystem has files which have had 3 billion modifications. You have 3 billion trees and the leaf node for that file in each tree points to one of two versions.
The smart way to search the tree is to compare all the roots and eliminate any which aren't different versions (there won't be any at this level, since new roots are only created for new snapshots). Then you descend one level in each and eliminate all which aren't different versions (which will eliminate 99% of the records at this level, since if you snapshot on a single file change most nodes will be shared across two trees except the one containing the one file that changed). Then you keep going down eliminating duplicates in this way. In the end you'll have a bunch of linked lists from root to leaf showing the one file that changed in each new root (a tree with only one node per level is a linked list). Then you search the leaf nodes for the file of interest and generate a linear history for that one file. If you are targetting a particular file then you can stop your search early on most of those trees anytime you discard the parent of the desired leaf (if you're looking for changes in/etc/passwd and in this tree only an unknown file in/usr changed you can stop searching).
That is still a lot of work, because there was no linkage between file versions in the data structures. A filesystem optimized for file versioning would store a link from each file to the previous version so that the history for a single file could be traversed with only one seek per version.
However, doing this from userspace is going to be even less efficient if the filesystem doesn't expose its internals. In userspace you have no visibility into which directories under a snapshot are a shared record in the filesystem. To trace the history of a single file requires descending to that file in every single tree, and doing a full comparison, which is far more operations than in the optimal algorithm. To trace the history of the entire tree requires comparing every file in every snapshot, which is an enormous number of operations even in RAM, let alone on disk.
If you've ever tried to do a git log on an individual file in a very large git repository you might have noticed this problem, and I believe git does things in the optimal way. (Git repositories are very similar to COW filesystems.) If you stuck your entire hard drive into a git repository and did a commit on every change, you'd quickly run into this problem.
To do this well really requires designing the feature into the filesystem. Doing it in a COW filesystem is especially challenging since if you want to remove a snapshot you need to potentially clean up broken links at the leaf level if you're actually linking across snapshots so that you can easily traverse file histories.
Agree that this is a challenge. It would seem to me that the simplest solution would be to create a version anytime you close the descriptor. I realize that some activities that keep files open for long times would not create versions, but for most mainstream cases it would probably work. It would certainly work better than just taking random snapshots at random times when a file might be half-modified.
A solution does not need to be perfect to be useful.
I suppose, though that still leaves you with the challenge of finding all the versions of a single file. I'm not as familiar with the zfs internals, but I don't believe there are any data structures in btrfs that make it easy to traverse all the versions of a single file.
Well, the whole idea would be to have simple snapshots of every file version without having to re-implement every application I use.
And it sounds like the answer to my second question is no. btrfs works in the same way. The snapshot is at the filesystem/subvolume level, and if you want to find all the versions of a particular file you basically have to find the file in every snapshot that exists and diff them all.
I love btrfs. I just don't think that it solves this particular problem, and neither does any other linux filesystem. The fact that nobody has implemented this on linux doesn't make it any less useful.
Can ZFS actually do versioning on every file close?
The versioning filesystem that Windows Server provides does not version at every file close. It does it via snapshots. So that shouldn't be part of the submitter's requirements.
He never said he was happy with Windows Server's versioning.
He did mention sharepoint, which does retain a version on every file save.
I'm well aware that zfs and btrfs can be told to snapshot the entire filesystem as often as you want to fire off a cron job.
Marriage is not exclusively about property and inheritance. I can sign a property deed along with someone I'm not married to and I can do the same in my will for inheritance.
While I agree in principle and I'd love to see states get rid of marriage legally, I do think that it will take a lot more reworking of laws to make it happen.
For example, in Pennsylvania any number of random people can buy a house together and each own a portion of the property. However, only a married couple can buy it such that they each own 100% of it. The practical difference is that if one property-owner has a lein in the first case, then the lein remains against their share of the property up to the value of that share even if that owner dies. However, in the case of a married couple if one member of the couple has a lein against the house and the other does not, then upon their death the lein does not remain against the house because the other owner already owned 100% of it and the dead owner is simply struck from the deed.
So, there are likely situations where marriage does get special treatment that need to be resolved.
However, I do agree that there isn't any situation handled by marriage that could be legally handled in some other way, and I'd love to see marriage become purely a cultural/religious/etc arrangement with no legal basis at all. You could still have standard contracts for property ownership among couples just as there are standards for contracts for buying/selling houses, and individuals could enter into these or modify them as they see fit.
Can you make it snapshot anytime a file is modified? Also, can you easily find all the snapshots for a single file? Or do you just have 3 million subdirectories where a given file might or might not change between any random pair of them?
Can ZFS actually do versioning on every file close? I know it can do snapshots, but of course btrfs can do that as well. I'd think that the goal of a versioning filesystem would be that versions are captured anytime a file is written, not just when the admin hits the snapshot button, or once an hour, or whatever.
As far as I've seen the COW filesystems only do snapshots when they're asked to, and I'm not sure they're designed to scale to the point where you have billions of snapshots for millions of files.
1. There were HUNDREDS of lawyers involved in combing over every letter of that law. You really think someone left one of the key parts of the bill sloppily worded like that?
Isn't that a bit like saying that there were HUNDREDS of programmers involved in combing over every line of that software. Do you really think that it could contain a bug?
The actual architect of the law, as well as some other people involved with the writing, specifically stated at the time the law was being written that the purpose of the tax credit only applying to State exchanges was to force uncooperative states to comply with the law.
Perhaps, but the intent of the writer isn't nearly as important as the intent of the congressmen who voted for it, likely not having even read the entire thing.
When you write laws that are hundreds of pages long, it will be like writing software hundreds of pages long, and there will be bugs. The solution to legal "bugs" is to fix them, not pretend we're computers. That is what the court did.
If Congress really intends for Obamacare to go into a death spiral, they can always pass a law to make that happen.
I'm not saying it is the right solution, but in many areas the individual is responsible.
If an airline tells a pilot to fly more than the legal number of hours in a week or they're fired, the pilot still loses his license if he complies. Of course, if they instead call the local regulator I suspect the airline will get a nasty visit from an inspector.
Engineers are legally liable if they sign off on an unsound building, regardless of the instructions of their employer.
The EU requires an EU citizen to sign off on the quality of imports of stuff like medical devices and if there is a problem they can go to jail. It is their responsibility to ensure that whoever they're working with is getting audited to ensure they are in compliance.
So, there are many areas of the economy where safety is critical and the solution is to make a particular individual personally criminally liable. It forces the buck to stop somewhere. That person is supposed to get a lot of clout with the regulators as well when they feel they're pressured to cut corners.
I think our priorities are a bit different. I don't really see stocks and property as an end in and of themselves.
Don't put words in my mouth. Although as it turns out you might want to look into where pension funds put their money.
I'm well aware that pension funds tend to put their money into stocks. I still don't see them as an end in themselves. There really is no need for private pensions if you have basic income, but certainly I wouldn't ban them. I would tax assets though.
Also, people with nothing to do tend to have kids, and that is definitely something the system couldn't afford, so there would need to be measures to prevent that (if having kids doesn't cost you a lot, you'll tend to have them).
Great, so phase two of your economic masterplan is to make sure the system bankrupts itself within a generation. Hint: people are producers as well as consumers.
Most modern production involves capital more than labor. Resources tend to be limited, and if you endlessly grow population you end up with tons of unemployed.
Plus, regulating childbirth is actually a way to cut down on welfare spending. The pure-free-market approach would be to require parents to pay for the full cost of raising kids before having them, thus ensuring that kids are never a cost on anybody but their parents. However, I think it would probably make more sense to have a bit more diversity and have society kick in to let more people have kids.
Just back of the envelope here, but take the US - 300 million population, give them $200 a week each, that's a cool $3 trillion dollars per annum, which is equivalent to the entire federal tax revenue in 2014. So, you're going to double all taxes to pay for this?
As you point out many some of that existing $3T already goes to social programs, which would be partially redundant. So, the cost wouldn't be quite that high.
However, I'm more than happy to double income taxes to pay for this. I'd lower taxes at the lower income brackets (which gives people more incentive to work), and I'd raise it at the higher brackets (which is where all the money is anyway). The US GDP is $15T - we can afford to pay for food/etc.
And this is before you start to consider the inflationary effects of pumping that much money into the economy, regardless of how recycled it is - most of that will be going to poor people who will mix it straight back into the liquid economy, taken from the mid to high level wealthy who tend to invest in property and stocks instead.
I think our priorities are a bit different. I don't really see stocks and property as an end in and of themselves.
But, I'm all for rehab/etc for those with addiction problems. Also, people with nothing to do tend to have kids, and that is definitely something the system couldn't afford, so there would need to be measures to prevent that (if having kids doesn't cost you a lot, you'll tend to have them).
Haven't been following it too closely, but I don't really see the new start menu as all that inspiring. I think that Win7 was a genuine improvement over XP. Having an in-focus search box when you hit the start key was actually a bit like having a command line, etc.
All those tiles just make everything appear less distinct and harder to find, and it seems like I'll be able to fit less stuff on my screen.
I'd be interested in a comparison of what percent of that spending directly benefits the intended recipient.
In the US somebody who simply doesn't want to work has no real benefits available to them. That means that you spend a lot of effort trying to regulate the bottom end of the employment food chain, because people are desperate for jobs.
Also, healthcare is a big area of public benefit spending in Europe, but costs are much lower there. That means that you get a lot more care per dollar spent than you get in the US. Also, in the US it is hard to get socialized medicine unless you're elderly or disabled.
I don't think you can measure the strength of social programs merely in the amount of money spent.
Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.
Then why would anyone put in the not-atypical 60-hour work week or do tasks they didn't want to do?
They would need to be very well-compensated. Lots of people would still choose to work. They'd probably work a lot less, and they wouldn't put up with nonsense. You're not going to live in luxury on basic income, so there will always be incentive to do more.
All of with lead to a more equal society in Europe instead of a winner-takes-all-screw-the-rest situation like in the US.
I think this is because of a misguided desire to turn employment into some kind of welfare system.
I think a better approach is to combine a super-efficient hands-off capitalist economy with a highly socialized government. Regulation on business should just be to deal with externalities (pollution/etc) and to prevent the formation of monopolies (which even conservative economists will agree destroy free markets).
Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.
In such a system there would be plenty of risk-taking, and the wealthy will be able to earn great deals of money. They would of course then pay a large portion of that back in taxes. However, we won't begrudge them the odd private jet if everybody gets decent healthcare and a roof over their head.
The problem with the US is that our social programs are even weaker than in Europe, and so are worker protections. We have that strong economy as a result, but the money just goes into the hands of a few instead of benefitting the many.
So why is this on slashdot exactly? This site is supposed to be about the tech itself, not the financial problems of the people behind it.
Treating this like "Shuttleworth's problem" is losing sight of the big picture. The SA government is desperate to prevent money leaving the country, because if it was easy to get out, a significant chunk of the population would (SA, particularly in the large cities, is not a fun place to live). They may have eliminated the apartheid-era controls, but they've introduced far stricter ones to prevent capital flight from the country. Shuttleworth's case is just one of the more visible ones, there are huge numbers of people who would leave if they could get their money out.
I think this is part of a more general problem. You see it more in lousy countries like South Africa, but the same thing really happens to a lesser degree everywhere.
In every country lots of people are born and die every year, and many people come and go. Those who are born tend to have abilities that fall onto various bell curves, generally reflective of the people who are already there, and the same is true of those who die. Those who come and go are not distributed in the same way. Those with a lot of talent/resources are much more mobile than those who lack these. If the country is a desirable place to live for those with the means to move, then there will be a net flow of these populations into the country. If the country is undesirable for the mobile to live in, then they will tend to leave.
So, if a country has lousy conditions or taxes mobile populations higher than other countries, then it will tend to lose these mobile populations. The problem is that these are also the people who are most able to pay taxes. People who are unable to earn much of an income or who are needy (disabled, etc) tend to stick around. That creates a downward spiral as those who are able to work leave, and those who are unable to work accumulate, and thus increase the demands on those who remain and still pay taxes.
The usual solution to this is to make it more difficult for people to leave on their own. The only other solutions I'm aware of basically amount to begging, or just neglecting those in need so that those who are well off don't have to pay for them and thus don't have as much incentive to leave.
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Sure, but having the bitcoin sitting in the bitcoin wallet doing nothing makes it kinda worthless, yah? The whole idea is to use it for commerce, at which point you are vulnerable to all sorts of scams and theft that you would normally be protected from.
The design is similar to cash. When you give $20 to the fast food joint down the road and decide you didn't like the food, your only recourse it to ask them for the money back. You can't phone up your credit card company and ask them to cancel the charges.
Sure, that is a model with pros and cons, but nothing prevents people from doing legitimate commerce in bitcoin.
Then there's liquidity. Most transactions are off-block-chain (as in one block-chain transaction per every ~400 or so off-block-chain transactions). They have to be, because putting a transaction on the block-chain takes too long.
That is definitely a limitation of bitcoin. It cannot be used safely and quickly at the same time. If you're not in a hurry there is no need to compromise safety though. I personally wouldn't use it for anything where a transaction needed to be done in seconds.
And then of course there's the volatility of the buying power of bitcoin itself. It's one of the most unstable and volatile currencies in existence.
That is just the nature of low-volume financial instruments of almost any kind. Look at penny stocks and such - they're extremely volatile. If it were used in real commerce it would stabilize pretty quickly, since if the price went up significantly somebody would just sell 30 tons of steel for bitcoins and make a huge profit, and when the price drops significantly they'd buy back the 30 tons of steel. What keeps currency stable is the HUGE market full of stuff whose vendors don't adjust prices 3 times per minute.
The reality is that the value of the dollar goes up and down by pennies all day long and yet the price of a carton of eggs at Walmart stays the same all day long. That means that at different times of day the profit of selling those eggs actually changes. If everybody did with dollars what they do with bitcoins and dynamically priced based on the currency value then you'd see much larger swings in the value of the dollar, because it wouldn't have the weight of the entire economy pinning its value. Governments would also not be able to play the same games they do with inflation. The whole "Grexit" thing is about Greece not wanting to cut pensions and such, but one possible solution they talk about is switching to Drachmas, which basically amounts to just cutting pensions by paying the same number of currency units but devaluing the currency in the process.
No, this is exactly the reason why open source is having such a problem. 'You can always audit the source code'. Yeah okay buddy, because I have the time/money to spend on extra programmers just to audit the problem you created.
You do realize that you can purchase open source software commercially, right? Then you get the same level of support that you get with proprietary software, and you get the source code as well.
How many bitcoin banks have decided to cut and run at this point?
Bitcoin is cash. What you call a "bitcoin bank" is really just a "bitcoin wallet" in somebody else's possession, and it is about as safe as trusting somebody with a wallet full of cash.
The closest thing to a bitcoin wallet involving a bank is putting cash in a safe deposit box. If you do that in the US it isn't protected by the FDIC. If you want to be protected by banking regulations you have to deposit your money.
Bitcoin was never designed around letting others hold your money. The design was really for individuals to hold their own money.
That's pretty much the same sentiment they had just before the Vietnam war. And then took a big bloody nose from the inferior Migs.
Very true, but just because missiles weren't ready to take over in Vietnam doesn't mean that they aren't ready today.
Vietnam also suffered from a lot of other problems. For one ROE - aircraft had to make visual identification before engaging, which basically negated any advantage the US aircraft even had. That and the general limited warfare thing which turned the whole theater into a meat grinder. Nobody was seriously bombing the bases the enemy aircraft were based at.
Vietnam was a LONG time ago now, much longer ago today than WW2 was back during Vietnam. People were quoting Vietnam this and that in the first Gulf War, and it wasn't remotely like Vietnam.
That said, unless the air force has some tricks up its sleeves that nobody knows about, the long-range missile capabilities of the US aren't really all that much better than anybody else's, which seems a bit crazy when they are relying on blowing up the bad buys before it comes down to a dogfight.
After the debacle with the F-22 and the F-105 I can't believe they bought another single engine fighter.
Well, the whole idea of the F-35 was that it was supposed to be the cheap replacement for the F-16, and hence the single engine. The problem was that they just tried to do too much with it, because heaven forbid that it isn't the absolute best in every category. By the time they really get it operational everybody will be using drones for this sort of thing anyway. Think about it - the mission of the F-35 is to be the bulk of the force, but not the aircraft you send in on the most critical air superiority missions (that is the role of the F-22). I'd think that would be the sort of thing you could easily use a drone for - take off, drop bombs, come back, and if AWACS spots enemy fighters either engage if you greatly overpower them, or just run and let the F-22s deal with them. Just have lots of ground crew taking care of the drones and you could basically have those things up in the air most of the time.
I also don't think that dogfighting is the real threat here. I already mentioned long-range AA missiles, but SAMs are a big threat too. Russia has those SA-10s which as far as I understand are VERY capable. I have no idea how well stealth defeats them, but they're really bad news for aircraft in general. Maybe they're counting on cruise missiles taking them out.
I stand corrected.
However, if you do want file versioning on every save, I'm not convinced that zfs/btrfs are great solutions.
I'm not familiar with zfs either, but I suppose this would be a basic function of zfs interfaces, wouldn't it?
Only if it is implemented as such. It probably isn't.
Suppose you have a file which was modified once (ie there are two versions). The overall filesystem has files which have had 3 billion modifications. You have 3 billion trees and the leaf node for that file in each tree points to one of two versions.
The smart way to search the tree is to compare all the roots and eliminate any which aren't different versions (there won't be any at this level, since new roots are only created for new snapshots). Then you descend one level in each and eliminate all which aren't different versions (which will eliminate 99% of the records at this level, since if you snapshot on a single file change most nodes will be shared across two trees except the one containing the one file that changed). Then you keep going down eliminating duplicates in this way. In the end you'll have a bunch of linked lists from root to leaf showing the one file that changed in each new root (a tree with only one node per level is a linked list). Then you search the leaf nodes for the file of interest and generate a linear history for that one file. If you are targetting a particular file then you can stop your search early on most of those trees anytime you discard the parent of the desired leaf (if you're looking for changes in /etc/passwd and in this tree only an unknown file in /usr changed you can stop searching).
That is still a lot of work, because there was no linkage between file versions in the data structures. A filesystem optimized for file versioning would store a link from each file to the previous version so that the history for a single file could be traversed with only one seek per version.
However, doing this from userspace is going to be even less efficient if the filesystem doesn't expose its internals. In userspace you have no visibility into which directories under a snapshot are a shared record in the filesystem. To trace the history of a single file requires descending to that file in every single tree, and doing a full comparison, which is far more operations than in the optimal algorithm. To trace the history of the entire tree requires comparing every file in every snapshot, which is an enormous number of operations even in RAM, let alone on disk.
If you've ever tried to do a git log on an individual file in a very large git repository you might have noticed this problem, and I believe git does things in the optimal way. (Git repositories are very similar to COW filesystems.) If you stuck your entire hard drive into a git repository and did a commit on every change, you'd quickly run into this problem.
To do this well really requires designing the feature into the filesystem. Doing it in a COW filesystem is especially challenging since if you want to remove a snapshot you need to potentially clean up broken links at the leaf level if you're actually linking across snapshots so that you can easily traverse file histories.
How do you define a "file version"?
Agree that this is a challenge. It would seem to me that the simplest solution would be to create a version anytime you close the descriptor. I realize that some activities that keep files open for long times would not create versions, but for most mainstream cases it would probably work. It would certainly work better than just taking random snapshots at random times when a file might be half-modified.
A solution does not need to be perfect to be useful.
I suppose, though that still leaves you with the challenge of finding all the versions of a single file. I'm not as familiar with the zfs internals, but I don't believe there are any data structures in btrfs that make it easy to traverse all the versions of a single file.
Well, the whole idea would be to have simple snapshots of every file version without having to re-implement every application I use.
And it sounds like the answer to my second question is no. btrfs works in the same way. The snapshot is at the filesystem/subvolume level, and if you want to find all the versions of a particular file you basically have to find the file in every snapshot that exists and diff them all.
I love btrfs. I just don't think that it solves this particular problem, and neither does any other linux filesystem. The fact that nobody has implemented this on linux doesn't make it any less useful.
Can ZFS actually do versioning on every file close?
The versioning filesystem that Windows Server provides does not version at every file close. It does it via snapshots. So that shouldn't be part of the submitter's requirements.
He never said he was happy with Windows Server's versioning.
He did mention sharepoint, which does retain a version on every file save.
I'm well aware that zfs and btrfs can be told to snapshot the entire filesystem as often as you want to fire off a cron job.
Marriage is not exclusively about property and inheritance. I can sign a property deed along with someone I'm not married to and I can do the same in my will for inheritance.
While I agree in principle and I'd love to see states get rid of marriage legally, I do think that it will take a lot more reworking of laws to make it happen.
For example, in Pennsylvania any number of random people can buy a house together and each own a portion of the property. However, only a married couple can buy it such that they each own 100% of it. The practical difference is that if one property-owner has a lein in the first case, then the lein remains against their share of the property up to the value of that share even if that owner dies. However, in the case of a married couple if one member of the couple has a lein against the house and the other does not, then upon their death the lein does not remain against the house because the other owner already owned 100% of it and the dead owner is simply struck from the deed.
So, there are likely situations where marriage does get special treatment that need to be resolved.
However, I do agree that there isn't any situation handled by marriage that could be legally handled in some other way, and I'd love to see marriage become purely a cultural/religious/etc arrangement with no legal basis at all. You could still have standard contracts for property ownership among couples just as there are standards for contracts for buying/selling houses, and individuals could enter into these or modify them as they see fit.
Can you make it snapshot anytime a file is modified? Also, can you easily find all the snapshots for a single file? Or do you just have 3 million subdirectories where a given file might or might not change between any random pair of them?
Can ZFS actually do versioning on every file close? I know it can do snapshots, but of course btrfs can do that as well. I'd think that the goal of a versioning filesystem would be that versions are captured anytime a file is written, not just when the admin hits the snapshot button, or once an hour, or whatever.
As far as I've seen the COW filesystems only do snapshots when they're asked to, and I'm not sure they're designed to scale to the point where you have billions of snapshots for millions of files.
1. There were HUNDREDS of lawyers involved in combing over every letter of that law. You really think someone left one of the key parts of the bill sloppily worded like that?
Isn't that a bit like saying that there were HUNDREDS of programmers involved in combing over every line of that software. Do you really think that it could contain a bug?
Words need to have meanings and laws need to have concrete meanings to whatever degree is possible.
You're suggesting that the principle that is the reason that all software contains bugs be the bedrock of jurisprudence?
The actual architect of the law, as well as some other people involved with the writing, specifically stated at the time the law was being written that the purpose of the tax credit only applying to State exchanges was to force uncooperative states to comply with the law.
Perhaps, but the intent of the writer isn't nearly as important as the intent of the congressmen who voted for it, likely not having even read the entire thing.
When you write laws that are hundreds of pages long, it will be like writing software hundreds of pages long, and there will be bugs. The solution to legal "bugs" is to fix them, not pretend we're computers. That is what the court did.
If Congress really intends for Obamacare to go into a death spiral, they can always pass a law to make that happen.
No doubt Apple will use this improvement in high-demand technology to justify a price hike.
I'm not saying it is the right solution, but in many areas the individual is responsible.
If an airline tells a pilot to fly more than the legal number of hours in a week or they're fired, the pilot still loses his license if he complies. Of course, if they instead call the local regulator I suspect the airline will get a nasty visit from an inspector.
Engineers are legally liable if they sign off on an unsound building, regardless of the instructions of their employer.
The EU requires an EU citizen to sign off on the quality of imports of stuff like medical devices and if there is a problem they can go to jail. It is their responsibility to ensure that whoever they're working with is getting audited to ensure they are in compliance.
So, there are many areas of the economy where safety is critical and the solution is to make a particular individual personally criminally liable. It forces the buck to stop somewhere. That person is supposed to get a lot of clout with the regulators as well when they feel they're pressured to cut corners.
I think our priorities are a bit different. I don't really see stocks and property as an end in and of themselves.
Don't put words in my mouth. Although as it turns out you might want to look into where pension funds put their money.
I'm well aware that pension funds tend to put their money into stocks. I still don't see them as an end in themselves. There really is no need for private pensions if you have basic income, but certainly I wouldn't ban them. I would tax assets though.
Also, people with nothing to do tend to have kids, and that is definitely something the system couldn't afford, so there would need to be measures to prevent that (if having kids doesn't cost you a lot, you'll tend to have them).
Great, so phase two of your economic masterplan is to make sure the system bankrupts itself within a generation. Hint: people are producers as well as consumers.
Most modern production involves capital more than labor. Resources tend to be limited, and if you endlessly grow population you end up with tons of unemployed.
Plus, regulating childbirth is actually a way to cut down on welfare spending. The pure-free-market approach would be to require parents to pay for the full cost of raising kids before having them, thus ensuring that kids are never a cost on anybody but their parents. However, I think it would probably make more sense to have a bit more diversity and have society kick in to let more people have kids.
Just back of the envelope here, but take the US - 300 million population, give them $200 a week each, that's a cool $3 trillion dollars per annum, which is equivalent to the entire federal tax revenue in 2014. So, you're going to double all taxes to pay for this?
As you point out many some of that existing $3T already goes to social programs, which would be partially redundant. So, the cost wouldn't be quite that high.
However, I'm more than happy to double income taxes to pay for this. I'd lower taxes at the lower income brackets (which gives people more incentive to work), and I'd raise it at the higher brackets (which is where all the money is anyway). The US GDP is $15T - we can afford to pay for food/etc.
And this is before you start to consider the inflationary effects of pumping that much money into the economy, regardless of how recycled it is - most of that will be going to poor people who will mix it straight back into the liquid economy, taken from the mid to high level wealthy who tend to invest in property and stocks instead.
I think our priorities are a bit different. I don't really see stocks and property as an end in and of themselves.
But, I'm all for rehab/etc for those with addiction problems. Also, people with nothing to do tend to have kids, and that is definitely something the system couldn't afford, so there would need to be measures to prevent that (if having kids doesn't cost you a lot, you'll tend to have them).
Haven't been following it too closely, but I don't really see the new start menu as all that inspiring. I think that Win7 was a genuine improvement over XP. Having an in-focus search box when you hit the start key was actually a bit like having a command line, etc.
All those tiles just make everything appear less distinct and harder to find, and it seems like I'll be able to fit less stuff on my screen.
I'd be interested in a comparison of what percent of that spending directly benefits the intended recipient.
In the US somebody who simply doesn't want to work has no real benefits available to them. That means that you spend a lot of effort trying to regulate the bottom end of the employment food chain, because people are desperate for jobs.
Also, healthcare is a big area of public benefit spending in Europe, but costs are much lower there. That means that you get a lot more care per dollar spent than you get in the US. Also, in the US it is hard to get socialized medicine unless you're elderly or disabled.
I don't think you can measure the strength of social programs merely in the amount of money spent.
Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.
Then why would anyone put in the not-atypical 60-hour work week or do tasks they didn't want to do?
They would need to be very well-compensated. Lots of people would still choose to work. They'd probably work a lot less, and they wouldn't put up with nonsense. You're not going to live in luxury on basic income, so there will always be incentive to do more.
All of with lead to a more equal society in Europe instead of a winner-takes-all-screw-the-rest situation like in the US.
I think this is because of a misguided desire to turn employment into some kind of welfare system.
I think a better approach is to combine a super-efficient hands-off capitalist economy with a highly socialized government. Regulation on business should just be to deal with externalities (pollution/etc) and to prevent the formation of monopolies (which even conservative economists will agree destroy free markets).
Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.
In such a system there would be plenty of risk-taking, and the wealthy will be able to earn great deals of money. They would of course then pay a large portion of that back in taxes. However, we won't begrudge them the odd private jet if everybody gets decent healthcare and a roof over their head.
The problem with the US is that our social programs are even weaker than in Europe, and so are worker protections. We have that strong economy as a result, but the money just goes into the hands of a few instead of benefitting the many.
So why is this on slashdot exactly? This site is supposed to be about the tech itself, not the financial problems of the people behind it.
Treating this like "Shuttleworth's problem" is losing sight of the big picture. The SA government is desperate to prevent money leaving the country, because if it was easy to get out, a significant chunk of the population would (SA, particularly in the large cities, is not a fun place to live). They may have eliminated the apartheid-era controls, but they've introduced far stricter ones to prevent capital flight from the country. Shuttleworth's case is just one of the more visible ones, there are huge numbers of people who would leave if they could get their money out.
I think this is part of a more general problem. You see it more in lousy countries like South Africa, but the same thing really happens to a lesser degree everywhere.
In every country lots of people are born and die every year, and many people come and go. Those who are born tend to have abilities that fall onto various bell curves, generally reflective of the people who are already there, and the same is true of those who die. Those who come and go are not distributed in the same way. Those with a lot of talent/resources are much more mobile than those who lack these. If the country is a desirable place to live for those with the means to move, then there will be a net flow of these populations into the country. If the country is undesirable for the mobile to live in, then they will tend to leave.
So, if a country has lousy conditions or taxes mobile populations higher than other countries, then it will tend to lose these mobile populations. The problem is that these are also the people who are most able to pay taxes. People who are unable to earn much of an income or who are needy (disabled, etc) tend to stick around. That creates a downward spiral as those who are able to work leave, and those who are unable to work accumulate, and thus increase the demands on those who remain and still pay taxes.
The usual solution to this is to make it more difficult for people to leave on their own. The only other solutions I'm aware of basically amount to begging, or just neglecting those in need so that those who are well off don't have to pay for them and thus don't have as much incentive to leave.